Obama to Pick Defense Aide for Energy Post

WASHINGTON — President Obama announced Tuesday that he would nominate Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, the National Security Council’s top nuclear proliferation and defense policy official, to be deputy secretary of energy.

If confirmed by the Senate for the No. 2 job at the Department of Energy, which has been held for five years by Daniel Poneman, Ms. Sherwood-Randall would join the department at a moment when it is remaking the nation’s nuclear weapons complex and figuring out the delicate politics of the boom in oil and gas fracking. She would oversee the nuclear complex and a multibillion-dollar program to overhaul the nation’s nuclear laboratories as well as its program to update a modestly shrunken arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Mr. Obama’s energy secretary, Ernest J. Moniz, was a longtime professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had worked in the arena of nuclear power and the move to lower carbon emissions. Ms. Sherwood-Randall brings a background in nuclear weapons and nonproliferation strategy to the department, which has split responsibilities for energy strategy and the country’s weapons and counterproliferation work.

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Elizabeth Sherwood-RandallCreditPool photo by Andrew Harrer

For Ms. Sherwood-Randall, 54, this would be a third job in the Obama administration, after a foreign policy career focused on Europe, Russia, Turkey and a range of defense issues. In her current job, as the White House coordinator for defense policy and for countering unconventional weapons, she oversaw the effort to get chemical weapons out of Syria and the development of the administration’s policy for dealing with the nuclear arsenal. That policy has prompted Mr. Obama’s critics on the left to complain his agenda to shrink the arsenal and the nuclear complex has been far less ambitious than he suggested as a candidate in 2008.

“She has been the White House point person on the nuclear weapons complex, and it’s been a complicated task because it’s where the Energy Department and the Pentagon meet,” said Ashton B. Carter, who as deputy secretary of defense until December often worked with Ms. Sherwood-Randall. “She’s a superb organizer, and she’ll need that skill — both in the nuclear complex and in the management of the tremendous changes brought about by the new exploitation of petroleum, and its consequences.”

Ms. Sherwood-Randall grew up in California and graduated from Harvard College, where her roommate was a future member of Mr. Obama’s cabinet: Penny Pritzker, the secretary of commerce. During the Clinton administration she was deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, and a protégée of William Perry, Mr. Clinton’s defense secretary.

In the 2008 campaign, she was a foreign policy adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton. When Mr. Obama became president, she was brought onto the National Security Council by Gen. James Jones, Mr. Obama’s first national security adviser, and Thomas Donilon, his deputy, and after General Jones’s abrupt departure, his successor. She handled European issues before moving to the defense and unconventional-weapons portfolio.

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of the headline with this article misstated the position for which Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall is to be nominated. It is deputy secretary of energy, not secretary.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama to Pick Defense Aide for Energy Post. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe